Abyss Redecorating

[galehar]

oh right, sorry
still, some sort of stepdown, I'll look into something more specific later.

[bisonbisonbison]

oh right, sorry
still, some sort of stepdown, I'll look into something more specific later.

Any function would probably apply well to all three cases (exit, down, rune), with downstairs the shortest to fire.

[brendan]

oh right, sorry
still, some sort of stepdown, I'll look into something more specific later.

Actually, I thought about this a little more, and I think this may be the wrong approach. It doesn't give us fine-grained control over the length of an abyss excursion.

[Tiktacy]

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with the abyss at all. I actually think it couldn't be more perfect.

I don't know why we insist on focusing on something that is already fine-tuned enough to be what is easily the most intense and terrifying experience in any game of crawl(aside from maybe an encounter with an OoF). If there is anything that needs redecorating, it is probably the swamp. But, that is a completely different thread.

Basically what I am trying to say is: the abyss is fine the way it is(at least mechanics-wise), and having "randomly" spawning exits just adds to the flavor and makes the experience that much more invigorating.

In regards to how we can improve abyss from here, I would say we should remove demons and replace them with a chance for virtually anything in the game to spawn(even though this would technically still include demons). I'm pretty sure this already exists to some extent, but I say it should replace the demons ENTIRELY, rather than partially. I mean, we would probably keep chaos spawns, neqoxecs, and cacodemons, but any demons other than that don't belong in the abyss outside of rare spawns imo. =/

[brendan]

Basically what I am trying to say is: the abyss is fine the way it is(at least mechanics-wise), and having "randomly" spawning exits just adds to the flavor and makes the experience that much more invigorating.

I haven't been advocating for the removal of "random" exit spawns, just a change in the nature of the randomness.

Here's how finding an Abyss exit works:
1. You run around for a while.
2. You find an exit.

The situation now is that exits are distributed uniformly at random throughout the abyss. Your time to find one follows a Poisson distribution. This makes for a very unpleasant tail distribution. You could spend 6000 turns wandering the abyss. This makes for bad gameplay.

With the change I've proposed, finding an Abyss exit would work like this:
1. You run around for a while.
2. You find an exit.

Exits will be distributed at random, but not uniformly so.

[Tiktacy]

Basically what I am trying to say is: the abyss is fine the way it is(at least mechanics-wise), and having "randomly" spawning exits just adds to the flavor and makes the experience that much more invigorating.

I haven't been advocating for the removal of "random" exit spawns, just a change in the nature of the randomness.

Here's how finding an Abyss exit works:
1. You run around for a while.
2. You find an exit.

The situation now is that exits are distributed uniformly at random throughout the abyss. Your time to find one follows a Poisson distribution. This makes for a very unpleasant tail distribution. You could spend 6000 turns wandering the abyss. This makes for bad gameplay.

With the change I've proposed, finding an Abyss exit would work like this:
1. You run around for a while.
2. You find an exit.

Exits will be distributed at random, but not uniformly so.

That 6000 turn possibility is what makes the abyss so terrifying and what makes an early exit that much more satisfying. I almost broke out into tears of joy when I found an early exit in the abyss super early on(I was getting amazing drops). That sounds like good gameplay to me.

[Sar]

Why was Volteccer_Jack's post deleted? It might've been a bit harsh in language, but he expressed his opinion on Abyss and it deserved to be heard. His criticisms weren't baseless either, at least from what I remember (I obviously can't check it because the post is gone).

[Sandman25]

I spectated a player who complained he had spent 3 hours in Abyss and I suspect it was more than 6,000 turns. Guaranteed exit would be a very good improvement.

[asdu]

That 6000 turn possibility is what makes the abyss so terrifying and what makes an early exit that much more satisfying. I almost broke out into tears of joy when I found an early exit in the abyss super early on(I was getting amazing drops). That sounds like good gameplay to me.

The 6000 turn possibility is what makes the Abyss boring when you get banished for the third time in your game by a reaper with a scythe of distortion summoned by a mummy priest in Tomb:3. What makes the Abyss terrifiyng is the chance of finding really nasty stuff in it, which is very likely to happen unless you get lucky with finding an early portal.
I'm guessing the proposal aims to make the Abyss less tedious for characters that have no real difficulty surviving in it for however long it takes them to find the exit. I mean, if you can reliably survive 3k turns of Abyss, then you can probably survive 6k turns as well.
And I know this is off topic here, but I find Pan to be a much worse offender, mostly due to the unannounced demonic rune forcing you to fully explore every floor until you find it. I once saw the morgue of a character that had to go through 126 (!!!) Pan levels before finding all 5 runes and an exit. I, for one, have decided that unless the demonic rune falls on my lap by sheer chance, I'll pretend it doesn't exist.

[Volteccer_Jack]

Why was Volteccer_Jack's post deleted? It might've been a bit harsh in language, but he expressed his opinion on Abyss and it deserved to be heard. His criticisms weren't baseless either, at least from what I remember (I obviously can't check it because the post is gone).

Describing what it is actually like to be in the abyss isn't allowed on this forum. Presumably because even describing it is uncomfortably close to torture.

You could spend 6000 turns wandering the abyss. This makes for bad gameplay.

I've routinely made 10,000+ turn trips to the abyss. 5,000+ turns is my typical assumption. Anything less I consider very good fortune. Partly because exits just don't appear, and partly because for various reasons you often can't fucking get to the exit.

For reference, roughly 2,000 turns is the point where all possible interest ends and sheer annoyance/boredom/rage begins. Because by that point, I've already experienced everything unique the abyss has to offer, probably multiple times. Seeing more bone dragons and liches and neqoxecs is not going to keep me interested, it is only going to kill whatever motivation I have left.

But by far the worst thing about Abyss is that it is a giant gaping real-time-sink. You get sent to the Abyss and 15 minutes or more time passes of my real actual life while in-game I am not only accomplishing nothing, I'm not even getting the vaguest tiniest indication of whether I am even close to getting back to the actual game. This makes everything even more boring and uninteresting. And god help you if you manage to escape and don't immediately read a scroll of blinking, since you'll just get banished again a couple turns later.

The fact that all this happens because you failed one MR check against one ogre mage out of dozens of ogre mages you killed just adds insult to injury.

[dck]

You get sent to the Abyss and 15 minutes or more time passes of my real actual life while in-game I am not only accomplishing nothing, I'm not even getting the vaguest tiniest indication of whether I am even close to getting back to the actual game.

To me this really is the most disrespectful and openly insulting to players part of how the abyss works, it just doesn't mind their enjoyment or interest in the game and forces them to play the mostly harmless "walk forever in a diagonal not killing anything" game for much too long.
My last win (HuCK) was a really fun and kinda interesting game and the two times I was sent to the abyss were immediate fun stoppers and during the second one I actually considered quitting this really fun game because the only interesting thing left to do was zot: $ and I was quite confident on being able to slap its shit.

[galehar]

Why was Volteccer_Jack's post deleted? It might've been a bit harsh in language, but he expressed his opinion on Abyss and it deserved to be heard. His criticisms weren't baseless either, at least from what I remember (I obviously can't check it because the post is gone).

He can be heard just fine as long as he doesn't behave like an obnoxious jerk. We don't have to put up with that. As for the content of his agressive rant, as usual it's just his opinion without any reason given or constructive criticism (let alone actual suggestions).
Disclaimer: I wasn't the one who moderated his post.

[duvessa]

Abyss also seems to be carefully designed to remove as much tactical thought as possible from crawl by getting rid of terrain usage (since it changes every turn anyway) and having monsters generate right in front of you, oh and it also has maprot (a blatant interface screw) because at that point why not.
I'm still amazed at the number of people who enjoy 0.10+ abyss. 0.9- abyss was bad, but at least it still felt sort of like you were still playing crawl instead of a slot machine.

[Wahaha]

I disagree with the Abyss removing terrain usage, I think it's completely the opposite. It makes you use terrain with the expectation that it can change. It doesn't mean you don't use terrain, it means you have to consider more possibilities, and adapt if certain changes happen.

Agree that monsters probably shouldn't generate in LOS.

Map rot is kind of necessary because the map changes anyway, there's no point in knowing what some area looked like 50 turns ago.

[WalkerBoh]

I love how every thread that starts out as "how can we improve this aspect of X" invariably turns into "this is what's wrong with this unrelated aspect of X". You guys would make great politicians.

To the actual point, I like the idea of linking abyss exit probability with number of tiles explored. That should dramatically improve the current situation.

[some12fat2move]

This is one possible formula for it: chance of a spawned tile being an exit is 1 in (5,000 / sqrt(number of tiles seen)).
That way an exit would not be guaranteed until you have seen 25 million tiles but that is incredibly unlikely and if I were to guess I'd say you would probably expect to explore about 3,000 tiles before seeing an exit with that formula (note that tiles explored is not the same thing as turns taken). Also note that the 5,000 up there could easily be tweaked to adjust desired abyss trip duration (increasing it makes abyss trips longer and decreasing it makes abyss trips shorter). And if you actually want to use that formula, you would probably have to set number of tiles seen to zero (or perhaps decrease it by D1000 or so) every time you see an exit, otherwise players looking for the rune would laugh at the outrageous quantity of exits that would start to appear after exploring about 10,000 tiles.